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WHY YOU REALLY SHOULD KISS AND MAKE UP BEFORE BEDTIME

Making up with your partner before you go to bed really does improve your mood the next day

Saturday March 13,2010

By Sarah Westcott

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THE old wives’s tale that you should never let the sun set on an argument has been proved right.

For scientists have discovered that kissing and making up with your partner before going to bed really does improve your mood the next day.

Researchers have located the precise area in the brain – the lateral prefrontal cortex – which can leave us seething when we wake up the following morning after an unresolved row.

Scans showed that those people whose brains were more active at that spot were less likely to be upset the following day after a spat.

Those showing less brain activity in the cortex were more likely to seethe – and for longer.

This critical brain area could also help regulate emotion in our day-to-day lives, Harvard and California University psychologists said in a study in the Biological Psychiatry journal.

Lead author Professor Christine Hooker said: “What we found, as you might expect, was that everybody felt badly on the day of the conflict with their partners. But the day after, people who had high lateral prefrontal cortex activity felt better and the people who had low lateral prefrontal cortex activity continued to feel bad.”

The team studied healthy couples in relationships of more than three months. Brain scans examined them as they viewed their partners with “positive, negative or neutral” facial expressions. The couples also recorded in an online diary their daily emotional state and whether they had had a fight with their partners.

Professor Hooker added: “The key factor is that the brain activity in the scanner predicted their experience in life. Scientists believe that what we are looking at in the scanner has relevance to daily life, but obviously we don’t live our lives in a scanner.

“If we can connect what we see in the scanner to somebody’s day-to-day emotion-regulation capacity, it could help psychologists predict how well people will respond to stressful events in their lives.”

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DISGRUNTLED

13.03.10, 8:54pm

Disgruntled. Everyone should read your story and remember it. I certainly will. Bitter sweet and a lesson for all of us.

• Posted by: Mikexxx • Report Comment

LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO ARGUE....

13.03.10, 2:56pm

.....my late husband and I always said 'goodnight, I love you' before we went to sleep, one morning he didn;t wake up, but he had gone to sleep knowing I loved him

• Posted by: Disgruntled • Report Comment